At long last, General Electric is on its way to exorcising the financial demons of Jack Welch.

It took 14 years, a near-death experience and a flat-lined stock price, but Mr. Welch’s successor, Jeffrey R. Immelt, is now getting out of the banking business and returning G.E. to its industrial roots. It may have taken too long, but the timing works now on many levels.

Mr. Immelt’s timing hasn’t always been so good. He took over as chairman and chief executive of G.E. on Sept. 7, 2001, and was at the helm for a financial collapse that led GE Capital to issue government-backed debt and cost the company its prized AAA rating.

Since 2009, Mr. Immelt has been shrinking the unit’s balance sheet. On Friday, he started hacking in dramatic fashion.

To start, the $260 billion pillar of corporate America said it would sell most of its commercial real-estate assets to buyout shop Blackstone, Wells Fargo and other buyers, in a collection of transactions valued at $26.5 billion.

Over the next two years, G.E. plans to refocus its financial operations exclusively where they are directly related to benefiting its operations in healthcare equipment, energy and aviation. That will mean shedding something like $200 billion of assets on GE Capital’s books at the end of 2014 and fully offloading its publicly traded consumer credit arm, Synchrony Financial, to investors in a $65 billion divestment.

It’s an opportune moment to act. The 31 percent rise in Synchrony’s shares since going public in August illustrates the growing appeal of financial assets and how lenders with large wholesale financing needs can exist on their own. What’s more, many banks in the United States are desperate for higher returns and have loan-to-deposit ratios low enough to take on some of G.E.’s corporate loans or its equipment, inventory or franchise finance businesses.